Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Bruno Mendaci, Adriano’s head of security and the closest thing her husband had to a friend, and the only one among the vast, devilish Cavalieri clan that she could loosely claim as her friend too, was standing outside the immense double doors of Adriano’s study.
A shiver of apprehension ran down Nyra’s spine as she stared at the oak doors.
Staring at his tight shoulders, she had a sudden sense that Bruno wasn’t guarding the doors so much as he was trying to keep himself out. For an intensely private man, Adriano was close with Bruno, more so than with Federico. Curious as she’d been, she’d never asked him about their relationship.
Bruno turned as Nyra walked closer.
The villa’s silence felt extra strange after the dinner. All the various cousins had urgently dispersed, no doubt to spread the latest updates about Adriano ending his marriage, and maybe even sell it to a pap for some cheap payout.
Another breath shuddered out of her.
It wasn’t like him to air his personal issues in front of his family. Why, then? Why had he humiliated her in such a way?
“It might be better to not disturb him now, bella ,” Bruno said, his words tinged with both warning and sympathy.
A part of Nyra wanted to heed his advice and hide away. Lick her wounds for the night. Would Adriano, a gentleman if she’d ever met one, have her thrown out if she didn’t follow his dictate? Would he order this friend of his to physically drag her out of his palatial villa, like a scene in some soap opera? What if he changed his mind come tomorrow morning? What if he was just angry now and would cool down tomorrow?
Disgust filled her at her own cowardice. “I appreciate your…advice, Bruno. But I’m not leaving without seeing him.”
“It might be better if you want to save this.”
“He declared to his family that this marriage is over and that I’m to leave. As if I was a…”
Shock painted over Bruno’s face.
“Honestly, it’s insulting to make me feel like I need permission to see my fucking husband. His or anyone else’s.”
“Then why did you…do all those things?”
Nyra blanched and hated that she couldn’t even meet this decent man’s gaze. “If he gives me a chance, I’ll try to explain.”
“I wish I…” Whatever he wished, Bruno shook his head and opened the door.
Nyra thought she’d heard him whisper sorry before she slipped in through the gap. Why was he sorry, of all people?
The immense chandelier with its numerous light fixtures caught her attention first. The architecture of the study was stunning—the two-story space looked expansive enough that Nyra had thought it straight out of a fairy tale when she’d first stepped into it.
It was the only space she loved at the villa. Now she was once again hit by how the dark wood floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that formed a semicircle were reflective of the man Adriano was.
Mystery and adventure and yet also a warm resting place—at least that’s what he’d represented to her.
The room smelled of leather and old books and cigars and spice, the latter contributed by Adriano’s sandalwood scent and warm sweat. The scent association made her skin prickle with need, images of his powerful body bearing her down into the bed, his muscled thighs holding her hips hostage as he drove inside of her.
Sex with Adriano, slow and tormenting or hard and fast, was always an out-of-body experience. And yet it had always been the silent emotion glittering in his eyes, unspoken even in the utmost moments of raw intimacy that had always sent Nyra tumbling over the edge.
It was the one place where she was always courageous and bold and he was… hers .
Only hers, and her entire world.
As she searched through the darkness for the stunning breadth of his shoulders, the crooked tilt of his mouth to one side when he caught her staring at him, the rough cadence of his voice when he crooked a finger at her and beckoned her to him…misery swamped her.
What if it was truly over?
Her gaze caught on the blown-up photos in color scattered haphazardly on the behemoth desk. Her entire world narrowed down to some kind of black hole.
It was her face staring back at her from the pic, caught in a man’s embrace. Intimate embrace at that, for his leg was pushed up between hers and his face was buried in her neck. But her eyes were wide-open, almost challenging. The strap of what was clearly a lacy corset top dangled over one shoulder, revealing a breast. Its smooth gold flesh all the more obscene held up by a masculine hand cupping it from below.
Her face and her neck, and her body…but not her.
Shock and something like anger…crashed over her, and she had the sudden urge to grab the paperweight from the desk and toss it across the wall, to break something with her hands.
This wasn’t her. Relief crashed down on her, then got swept away by fresh anger.
Could no one tell that the woman in the photos wasn’t Nyra?
Adriano should know that Nyra would never wear such a top, not even in the dark intimacy of their bedroom. That she’d turned herself inside out with shyness when the couture designer had forced her to pick from rows and rows of lacy negligees and barely there lacy thongs should have told him.
She preferred cotton underwear and her husband’s discarded shirts as sleepwear. On the nights that he allowed her to wear anything at all.
Gold highlights glinted in that woman’s hair, while Nyra’s had bronze highlights that were already fading, showing her usual mousy brown color at the roots. From how she stood to how she tilted her head to how she wore her hair—everything about the woman in the photos was different from Nyra. Except the fact that she looked just like her.
Nadia…
Tears prickled Nyra’s eyes as she ran her fingers over the smooth cheek of the woman in the photo. After years of searching for her, her twin, Nadia, had finally reached out to Nyra a couple of months ago.
Nyra had been sent to live with her great-aunt Olivia after their mother’s death. While the old woman hadn’t been happy about being landed with a fourteen-year-old and hadn’t been the warmest person on the planet, she’d given her shelter and food. The moment she’d turned eighteen, Nyra had left for the US, where Nadia had been sent to live with some distant cousin of her father. Who, she’d told Nyra in those early days when they had still kept in touch through email, was an outright bully and tormented her endlessly.
Then, one day, Nadia had written to her that she was running away from home and disappeared completely. Years of not knowing how her twin was faring had hollowed out Nyra.
Finally, two months ago, Nadia had reached out through an old email account, begging Nyra for help. She’d returned to the UK, she had said, admitting that she was in trouble and needed financial help.
The fact that her twin couldn’t make ends meet while Nyra was married to one of the richest men in Italy and rolling around in comfort had twisted her inside out. So, Nyra had turned herself into a thief and a cheat to get her hands on funds.
After three planned meetings in London though, all she’d known was heartache and confusion, because Nadia refused to come face-to-face with Nyra. Swallowing her disappointment, she’d left envelopes full of cash all three times, hoping her sister would eventually be ready to see her.
Her fingers lingered on Nadia’s cheek in the photo now. That this was how she was getting a glimpse of her twin after nearly a decade of separation…tore at her. Caught in a cheap, tawdry photo by someone who had clearly tailed her, thinking she was Nyra.
Was it Bruno? she thought with sudden disgust. Had he been ordered by Adriano to tail her and click these pics of her? How could he have invaded her sister’s privacy like this?
And how could Adriano think that she would do this with…another man after everything they’d shared? How dare he?
Suddenly, the cruelty with which he had ended their relationship made perfect sense.
As if he was made of shadows, Adriano drifted into place behind the desk. He might as well have put an ocean between them, Nyra thought, looking across the expanse of it.
Thick, curved lashes hid his expression and she nearly stomped her foot in frustration. Three inches over six feet and with a broad-shouldered frame, he was too much masculinity to take in one glance. Too much magnetism to not get burned.
And she’d been so utterly lost in her own destruction, like a moth inevitably rushing toward the flame. But whatever it had been, it had been real, raw. In a moment of utter self-pity, tears filled her eyes and overflowed.
“Am I to think that the tears represent regret? Or are they of remorse?”
She dabbed them with the back of her hand, telling herself that they were the last she would ever shed over him. “I haven’t done anything I regret or have to repent. Except maybe thinking that you’re different from other men.”
“Ahh…it’s a madness both of us contracted, I think. So?” he said, that deep, gravelly voice vibrating with impatience and so much more.
“What, Adriano?” she said, his name falling from her lips like a caress even in the midst of roiling fury. It was entrenched too deep to be plucked out at a moment’s notice. “Is there a question you’re actually asking me instead of issuing decrees? Tell me, if I don’t leave, will you have your rabid family drag me outside by my hair? Will you call the polizia and tell them your wife is a thief and a cheat and…what, a slut?”
His chin reared down and he took a step back from the desk. As if her blazing anger was a shock wave he hadn’t expected to encounter.
If she wasn’t shaking with said anger, Nyra would’ve laughed at how shock painted his features. There was nothing in the world that could catch Adriano unawares. Nothing that could shake or dent his self-possession.
Had all these months meant nothing to him? How could they, if he thought her capable of this?
“You’ve been lying to me for months, stealing from my family…”
“Nothing you would have missed. Nothing that would harm anyone. You know that I—”
Laughter escaped his mouth, making him look painfully gorgeous. “Is it true that you’ve stolen silver candlesticks that have been in the family for two hundred years?”
Nyra’s cheeks heated. “Yes. I sold them because I needed the money. I sold the diamond ring you bought me as a wedding present and swapped it with this cheap one,” she said, turning the ring round and round on her finger.
The cheap metal had begun to leave a green ring on her skin since she refused to take it off. To take off the one he’d bought her had been torment enough.
Given the state of her marriage currently, the ugly ring of green however seemed like a better fit.
“Why? Why did you need the money?” he said, surprising her with that particular question.
“I…” God, where did she even begin?
“Why refuse an allowance or a bank account in your name or even an expense card if all you wanted was money all along?” Adriano said, not giving her the chance to answer. “Why pretend to morals you don’t have?”
The depth of his frustration calmed her rising temper.
Yes, he had jumped to conclusions, but she had laid the foundation of lies for him to build on. This was on her. At least a major part of it. Most of it. “I needed the money urgently, Adriano. And it’s true that I made up reasons for—”
“What…to see your lover at a seedy motel in some godforsaken part of London? To run around behind my back?” Something that sounded like pain reverberated in his words. “Or had you begun gathering funds for your exit strategy? Would I have had a grand first anniversary present request to pad it?”
Nyra found herself moving around the desk, toward him, before she had decided to do so. As if she was nothing but a magnet and he her true north.
The familiar scent of him enveloped her senses like a lash, threatening to bind her to him. Her arms trembled with the effort she exerted to stop herself from throwing herself at him.
His chest would be hard and solid and he would hold her against him, hold off the incoming storm. In his arms, she’d always felt safe. From that first night, when she’d asked him to hold her while they slept.
In a life that had been lonely and bereft of touch and warmth for so long, he had been like a blanket made of sunshine.
He stepped back from her, as if her touch, her nearness would taint him.
When she looked into his eyes, there was nothing but a cold, dead frost there. And that confirmation there—that he believed all those loathsome things about her—was enough to kill the last tendril of love she had for him.
“If you want to believe that I cheated on you, that I went seeking this man in some cheap motel in London,” she said, grabbing a photo and throwing it at him, “that I undressed for him while you were working in some remote corner of the world, that I welcomed his touch and kisses and let him do all the wicked things you do to me, that I let this man move inside me with the same desire I showed you, then there’s nothing more for me to say.”
His head jerked up as if she had dealt him a body blow. Beneath his olive skin, a paleness emerged and it struck her like a coiled snake in waiting, shaking her resolve.
She backed away from him, nearly getting tangled in her own feet, afraid of her own neediness and the overwhelming urge to please him, to soothe him, and to court his approval, even as he shattered her heart.
Maybe she hadn’t truly loved him then, because leaving shouldn’t be easy, she thought, reaching for the damned door handle, eyes blurry with tears.
“Nyra?” Her name fell from his lips softly, with none of the contempt he clearly felt for her.
She thumped her forehead against the thick wood, wishing she could disappear into its grain. “What?” she said, with enough belligerence to sound like a pissed-off teenager. Figured that the little courage she possessed came out when everything around her was burning to the ground.
“It is you in that picture. Why, cara ?” That he called her that even as he thrust a silken knife into her chest made her want to laugh like a maniac.
If he’d let a hint of doubt seep into his voice, if he had let her see the thinnest crack in his veneer, if he hadn’t hung her out to dry in front of his family, maybe she would have turned around and explained it.
But God, she was as sick of living in fear of Adriano and his prestigious family discovering whose daughter she was, of wondering how long the safety of his arms would last.
It was high time she dwelled in reality. For the innocent life in her belly if not for herself.
“Is there anything to explain? Clearly you have decided that I fucked another man,” she said, choosing the abrasive words deliberately. Softness had no place in her life anymore. “I hope the image of me, half-naked and writhing against that man, haunts you for the rest of your life.”
It wasn’t the greatest parting shot, but she felt a bloodthirstiness she’d never known in herself, that she embraced now.
Foolish to think that a man like Adriano Cavalieri wouldn’t wipe off the slate and start over again with a more beautiful, accomplished woman, but in this, she would indulge herself.
That the image would torment him as much as he’d hurt her.